Now that all mirrors are finished, feel free to publicly discuss this tournament. I'll post the packets tonight.

I apologize in advance for the sloppy copy-editing, numerous typos, etc - my work schedule got really busy in the month ahead of CO, and between a few other projects and this I wasn't able to give it the difficulty check or read-over that I usually do with other tournaments. In the future, I probably won't commit myself to nearly as many concurrent projects while transitioning roles at work.

In any case, I think this tournament adhered pretty much to my original announcement (aside from me roping in Itamar to write a few questions), stating "Difficulty may be somewhat variant and can best be characterized as "very high" - I will not specify anything further. There will be somewhere between 8 and 10 packets, and I'll be writing all of them." The set was very much intended to be and came out as a vanity set, and some tossups were a lot easier than others because I didn't want to pick impossible clues that nobody knew on an answer that I still wanted to write. I hope it was able to remain enjoyable and playable nonetheless.

If there's one thing I really wanted to do with this tournament, it was to show that there was a lot more "cultural mythology" types of questions that could be done with the myth category. For example, the tossups on the Wild Hunt, Hengist and Horsa, Orion, and Hittites (for example) I think tried pretty hard to highlight cultural importance of certain events/rituals/themes/motifs. I hope more of these sorts of clues can be incorporated into future myth questions.

For those who haven't seen the most recent packets - the tossup on cadenzas was replaced with one on Ferruccio Busoni after complaints about that question. It may be found below:

Packet 3 wrote:Letters between this composer and Arnold Schoenberg indicate that the latter got pissed at this composer for creating a concert version of the second of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces. This composer quipped “Music was born free, and to win freedom is its destiny” in A New Esthetic of Music. The nineteen cadenzas created by this composer are denoted with BV numbers one through nineteen. This composer created the one-act opera Arlecchino to accompany his version of Turandot, which he spent thirteen years composing a suite for. His massive (*) Piano Concerto in C major, which takes approximately 70 minutes to perform, ends with a movement in which a male chorus sings lines from the drama Aladdin. He’s probably best known for his transcriptions, including two concert transcriptions of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. For 10 points, name this early 20th century Italian composer.

Very specific issues (noticed while writing and reading):Several grammatical problemsA few tacky lead ins (especially on Brazil and Orion)Extreme fraudability in places (shareholders)Ambiguous clues in places (Brahui in Pakistan tossup)An almost gratuitous amount of finance stuff

More general things this set was really good on:Good East Asia contentCool cross-disciplinary thought (Newton, Ruskin)A lot of tossups on topics I like (Madagascar, language isolates, there bronze age collapse, ethnic minorities in the middle East)

Jakob MyersThe Michigan State University 'Fall 19ish, Naperville North '17"No one has ever organized a greater effort to get people interested in pretending to play quiz bowl"-Ankit AggarwalAdmin, ILQBM

This is kind of the running theme for this set. If your interests didn't align with the author, you weren't really going to like this set. That's to be said about any vanity set (the other one that comes to mind is that Will Nediger set played at Crime), so it wasn't a big deal here. There were a few fraudable questions (shareholders is a good example) and a few early clue drops (like Peter Singer showing up in the first line of that famines TU), but overall the set was interesting and playable.

Eric MukherjeeWashburn Rural High School 2005Brown University 2009Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania MSTP 2018